Hiding from Heidegger

In today’s New York Times, Patricia Cohen reports on the controversy aroused several years ago in France, and now here, by the book “Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy”:

Drawing on new evidence, the author, Emmanuel Faye, argues fascist and racist ideas are so woven into the fabric of Heidegger’s theories that they no longer deserve to be called philosophy. As a result Mr. Faye declares, Heidegger’s works and the many fields built on them need to be re-examined lest they spread sinister ideas as dangerous to modern thought as “the Nazi movement was to the physical existence of the exterminated peoples.”

I look at it differently. Rather than wondering what the study of Nazism reveals about Heidegger, I find it more interesting and useful to consider what the study of Heidegger reveals about Nazism. The answer is, a great deal. Neither Heidegger nor Nazism developed in isolation from the broader currents of European history and thought, and, just as Heidegger attempted, in his philosophy, to discover, in Germany, the values and the ideas of classical, ancient Greece (i.e., pre-Christian and pre-Platonic ways of thought), so Nazism is (among other things) an attempt to resuscitate a classical political order—entailing shocking cruelty—with modern, industrial means. Jacques Derrida’s extraordinary book “De l’esprit: Heidegger et la question” (Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question) shows the connections of Heidegger to other, non-Nazi thinkers of the day, and suggests that Heidegger and Nazism are only the most extreme examples of the European malaise of that time. (And another way to look at the work of Derrida itself is as a lifelong project to reclaim Heideggerian methods and projects from the right and for the left.)

In short, studying Heidegger and studying Nazism are both far broader and deeper projects than the clean-hands sniffing that Faye (on Cohen’s account—I haven’t read his book) presumes. Or, to put it differently, given France’s history (and even the inextricable connection of many modern French institutions to the Vichy regime), for a French person to say “they” rather than “we” on the subject—to think that the subjects of both Heidegger and Nazism can be kept behind the walls of a separate academic department rather than being considered central to philosophy—is absurd, indecent, and false.

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